Judge denies motion for new trial in Oracle v. Google

If Oracle wants to keep fighting for its copyright and patent infringement lawsuit against Google, it's going to have to do so in an appeals court.

Judge William Alsup returned with a ruling on Friday in regards to Oracle's motion for judgment as a matter of law for a new trial. Given that the original 12-person jury couldn't come to a unanimous, complete verdict during the copyright phase of the trial, Oracle hoped it could get the chance to present more evidence with a new argument.

However, the judge denied the motion, so a new trial will not happen.

Thus, the likely next step for Oracle would be to take this case to a federal appeals court.

At a case management hearing in June, Oracle's legal team explained that it filed a stipulation in which Google was asked to pay $0 in statutory damages (in reference to the nine lines of code in the rangeCheck method and the test files) in order to move proceedings along faster as it works toward an appeal.

The decision also follows Google's petition last week to have Oracle pay its administrative costs, which ring up to a grand total of $4,030,669. That amount basically covers a lot of paper copying, filing and other related tasks -- not attorney fees.

Kristin Zmrhal, project manager of discovery support at Google, wrote in defense of Google's petition, explaining that the Internet giant "is the prevailing party and is entitled to recover costs."

The judge has not ruled on that motion yet.

For reference, Oracle originally sued Google in 2010 over patent and copyright infringement related to the presence of Java technology on the Android mobile operating system. Oracle owns Java as part of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which took place earlier that year.

Eventually, the case broke down to two claims of patent infringement while the copyright phase of the trial focused on 37 Java APIs that appeared in earlier versions of Android.

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